The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters has been adopted by many as a model summary manual of python's philosophy.  Though these statements should be considered more as guideline and not mandatory rules, developers worldwide find the poem to be on a solid guiding ground.

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

I suspect that many of you are familiar with the term "hard coding a value" whereby the age of an individual or their location is written into the condition (or action) of a business rule (in this case) as shown below:

if customer.age > 21 and customer.city == 'denver'

then ...

Such coding practices are perfectly expectable provided that the conditional values, age and city, never change. They become entirely unacceptable if a need for different values could be anticipated. A classic example of where this practice occurred that caused considerable heartache in the IT industry was the Y2K issue where dates were updated using only the last 2 digits of a four digit number because the first 2 digits were hard-coded to 19 i.e. 1998, 1999. All was well provided that the date did not advance to a time beyond the 1900’s since no one could be certain of what would happen when the millennia arrived (2000). A considerably amount of work (albeit boring) and money, approximately $200 billion, went into revising systems by way of software rewrites and computer chip replacements in order to thwart any detrimental outcomes. It is obvious how a simple change or an assumption can have sweeping consequences.

You may wonder what Y2K has to do with Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS). Well, what if we considered rules themselves to be hard-coded. If we were to write 100s of rules in Java, .NET or whatever language that only worked for a given scenario or assumption, would that not constitute hard-coded logic? By hard-coded, we obviously mean compiled. For example, if a credit card company has a variety of bonus campaigns, each with their own unique list of rules that may change within a week’s time, what would be the most effective way of writing software to deal with these responsibilities?

Memory management is always a priority in pretty much any programming language you would want to use. In the lower level languages such as C, there are a number of functions which help you manage the memory your application uses, but they are not the easiest to use. Some of the more modern programming languages such as Python, Ruby, Perl, and of course the subject of this article, Javascript all have a built in feature called garbage collection.

Garbage collection essentially means that the languages compiler will automatically free the memory being occupied by unused variables and objects, but there is no telling when this could occur. It is purely down to the compiler to decide when the garbage collection process should be initiated.

F#, which is usually pronounced as F sharp is one of the newly launched and rapidly developing programming languages.  It has recently become focus of attention due to its quick advancement to the 12^th position in the recent TIOBE index and the overall rise in popularity.

What is F#?

F# is an open source, functional and object oriented programming language which is available in cross platform. It was developed by a company called F# software foundation with help of Microsoft and other open contributors. F# runs on Linux, windows, iOS, Android and the GPUs and HTML as well. It is a mature programming language which helps the users as well as the organizations to solve the complex problems in a much simpler way with easy code. With its wide range of usage in the specialist and application areas, it is proving itself to be a worthy contender for the top 10 list.

Why choose F#?